


strange, strong, supreme

by SearchingforSerendipity



Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Doctor Strange (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Chracter Study, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-29 05:03:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8476375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/pseuds/SearchingforSerendipity
Summary: Stephanie Strange is a Doctor, and don't you forget it.





	

 

 **0**  

 The world doesn't like sharp, arrogant women holding scalpels like swords, but then the world is far too fond of destruction and too often sees swords where they don't exist. Because swords are supposed to mean strenght, and a scalpel is supposed to mean salvation, and for so many those are different things. Stephanie Strange does not agree. 

Stephanie Strange is Doctor Stephanie Strange, and don't you forget it. She will never let anyone forget it. 

 

**i**

Stephanie Strange is in her forties, short dark hair starting to be streaked with gray at the temples, and her beautiful hands are _ruined_. She owes so much to those hands. The long, straight fingers, fast and careful and steady, never wavering. They are sexy fingers, strong fingers. Her career and worth and sanity rest in those hands, the lives of hundreds have been put together by those cold fingers. They're precise, unmarked. She had taught herself not to let her hands shake the days after her parents funeral, and now they trembled like leaves in a cold wind.

Her colleagues whisper and giggle and look at her with pity, poor Doctor Strange, not a Doctor any longer. They no longer call her  _that strange bitch, fucking steel-hands strange_ even though she loved the epiteth, loved that she was more than enough of a threat that those little minds had trouble to classifying _._ She can see it in the eyes of her male colleagues, the victorious gleam of satisfaction. Finally, Strange can't turn the operation room into her kingdom of steel and song quizzes. Finally, she is in her place, away from us, away from glory. 

She is furious, unspeakably angry, terrified to the core, and for the first time in decades her hands shake with it.

 

  
**ii**

They tell her to leave all she thinks she knows behind. Stephanie scoffs and nods and thinks, unlikely, and no way in hell. She is a creature of facts, an encyclopedia of a woman; they can change the way she stands in the world, change the shape of her existence, but her knowledge is her treasure, and Stephanie has never been poorer, so she's allowed to be a miser and a hoarder

She is a sceptic, an elitist, a broken goddess: her faith is a terrible and wrathful thing. They speak to her about the spirit and she laughs. The human body is all the religion she needs, even now that it fails her.

The Ancient One can read her like a book, the way Stephanie can read the human body, though, and she hates it, hates the little part of her that wants to be known by someone. But not like this, this is revelation and humiliation a paradigm shift like a tectonic place shift. This is an earthquake, and everything before is ruins.

They show her a world beyond the world, spheres upon spheres of existence that look suspiciously like the bad drug weekend in '89 during medical school. They give her tea, put her in her place (people love doing that to her, it must be something in her face, it must be her smart mouth, her proud chin, the bared flash of her neck), and throw her back into the streets.

She knows, after, that they're impressed with her stubbornness. And that's good, they better get used to the feeling, but on the other hand, it wasn't like she was going to do anything else. She's a penniless woman in a foreign city without a place to stay the night. She'd already been robbed once, the watch broken and battered to irony. Her hands shake, shattered and glued back together bones rattling. Did they really think she was going anywhere?

Did they really think they had a door strong enough, magic or not, to keep her away from knowledge?

 

  
**iii**

Wang and Mordo look at her and see the traitorous master, the same hunger and arrogance. They see her short hair and her her sharp, sarcastic words and are always a little bit too unsurprised by the piles of books the devours. Stephanie hates not surprising people, hates having being predictable, almost as much as she hates not being trusted. Not trusted - relied upon. Needed, without question, without anyone even thinking of glimpsing her doubt and fear.

These people can see it with a third eye and smell her fear, and she can't falter, not here, especially not here here, now, where she is a stranger in a strange land (ah!) the pupil humbly seeking knowledge. She does not regret falling to her knees and begging to be taught, but the part if her that is young and earnest (and burned and sterile, clothed in steel) has to be told not to care about impressing others.

It is easy enough, when there is so much knowledge here, guarded by the librarian with the threats and the secret Beyoncé addiction. She knows herself to know that between sticking it to the man and feeling the rush of new knowledge, the books will always win.

She takes the Eye of Agamotto and controls the tide of time in a single apple, and for a moment she remembers her mother’s name was Evangeline, Eve, and she says, hah, take that sexist biblical analogies. She totally rocked at this forbidden knowledge thing. 

The Ancient One looks at her and sees herself. They hold hands until she lets go. Outside, the snow falls.

 

   
**iv**

Christine stitches her back together, pumps her full of electricity and life and power, so strong the astral plane echoes with it. Pamela would have stitched her together before, if she had let her, and Stephanie has to apologize, even as she bleeds out, even if all her instincts scream that it is wrong wrong wrong to be in this side of the table.

It's painful, strikingly painful, to be stabbed, to be the focus of such violent intent. She wants to say, I am a doctor, a life saver, I came to be healed not to become a soldier. But there is a war going on that goes beyond twisted loyalties, that threatens to destroy the world. Time is being stolen.

Time is every doctor's worst enemy. Sickness can be conquered to a point, corruption controlled, but in the end all that they can do it bargain with time, take a little more out of the belief that people are always due a little more time. Time runs too fast and not fast enough, time stains her temples with white and weights her down more than any cloak.

 _I come to bargain,_ she tells Dormmandu, again and again, until the number of tomes she has been stabbed and swallowed and destroyed number in the dozens, until she is heard. Until her most important patient is saved.

They all look so surprised, her allies. Don't they know Stephanie Strange is an unstoppable force?

 

**v**

Stephanie Strange sits face to face with a god and gives him tea, water, beer. She smiles at his bewilderment (so Earth has sorcerers now, and oh, had Asgard really underestimated them so much? That was delicious). There is a sentient cloak around her shoulders, the red of blood and sovereignty. Around her neck is a stone from outer space with the power to destroy planets and piece them back together.

She is the Sorcerer Supreme, and they call her Doctor.

 

**Author's Note:**

> yesterday i watched dr strange and i loved it, except that all i could think was 'man this would be so much better if strange was a woman'. so there is this.
> 
> come say hi to me on [tumblr](http://searchingforserendipity25.tumblr.com)


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